How the World Ends

by Joel Varty

  Go to the river. Find the footbridge. Cross the river. Wait. Be Patient. Follow the tracks. Walk.

  I embrace the darkness as I escape the glow of the streetlamps along the edge of the river. The footbridge is there, unguarded, cloaked in darkness – left behind. I step onto the bridge and quickly make my way across. The night cradles me in her invisible folds of mist and ether. Strangely enough, although I know this is the only way for me to escape this place, I feel cowardly. I feel that I should be doing something of bold brevity against the oppression of the common folk like myself, but I don’t turn back. Not when the murmurs behind me turn to shouts and yells. Not when the shouting becomes screaming and gunshots and the gunshots became silence once again. I struggle not to be seen or heard.

  Once I cross the river, I sit on the wet ground beside a tree in a small park. The darkness here is nearly complete, as the place is shadowed by the newly blossomed leaves of the giant maple in a small enclave at the edge of the city, near the spot where the river falls away into the lake.

  I feel tears well up in my cold wet eyes. The loneliness of survival, so quickly come upon me, is overwhelming. I hate myself for my cowardice, and my ability to walk away from a crowd of people that I now despair of being dead, or in the process of becoming so. I have to get away, to escape, to stay alive, to find my family, and keep them safe. I have to find out what has happened – and why. At the moment, though, that seems as much a distraction as it is a purpose.

  The noise begins to die down a bit, the gunshots and screams becoming further apart as people, I presume, are pursued throughout the city. I hear them crying out as they are hounded back to the buildings that will hide them from the outside. I know that there is an answer to this but it doesn’t present itself to me, and I am too afraid to seek it out. I feel only the need to escape.

  My legs begin to cramp with the increasing coolness of the night, but I don’t move. Footsteps, boots on the bridge, alert me to a presence. I hear the sound of a radio squelch and intermittent voices reporting on crowd movements in other areas. It is a guardsmen’s personal radio – attached to his helmet, but still audible in the quiet of the night. I try not to breath, wishing that I had taken more care in finding my hiding spot. The guard stands at the edge of the bridge, hesitant. The voice on the radio is now a sharp question, but I can’t make out what it is. A few furtive glances this way and that, then the guard turns back towards the downtown area with its train station, skyscrapers, and greater accumulation of people.

  I know it is time to move. I know where I must go – and the waiting has only made it clearer where I must go. Follow the tracks, says the voice, now more than a whisper, more than an imaginary sound, it is as real a sound as one can hear in their head without the sound being spoken. I feel that it is the right move.

  The tracks are right near the lakeshore, and I skirt the edge of the river using its myriad bushes and shrubs for cover on my way. The railway bridge over the river is flat with no arch or side-rails. From this side I have a clear view of the station and all the engines parked there – and not for the first time I wonder why. Why is this happening? Is it an invasion? Who are these guards and what are they protecting? Are we really prisoners in this place? Do we have any options? Do I have any option but to run from it?

  Shaking my head with the confusion of it all, with the disparity of the thoughts of running versus fighting versus hiding. The fear, and its shame, is haunting me. The thoughts of my family, hopefully safe in our house – but I don’t know that, are teasing me. I don’t know what to think. The voices are silent now; this is my decision, as I stand at the railway tracks peering to my right into the darkness of the station against the lamp of the city.

  The silence is nearly complete now, with no more shouting or gunfire. It reminds me of camping with my brother and the way our voices, once we had stopped talking, would leave a vacuum of silence that allowed all manner of other sounds, ones that belonged to the silence of the darkness, to creep forth into being. These sounds now accost me – taunting me with their calls.

  All at once, the lights of the city flicker back out. The silence is absolute. The darkness, though, is not that bad. The mist seems to have cleared for the moment. Bright stars and a crescent moon, rising in the east, reflect off the mirror of the lake water. I turn towards home and, by the power of this faint light, begin the long walk toward my family.

  …

  Lucia

  The stairwell of the condo building is pitch-black. There are no windows, and the emergency lights are not lit. The doors at each floor are locked and her electronic keys do not work. By the faint but dying glow of her cellphone, Lucia Hadly slowly creeps down through the gloom towards ground level. She slips past the glowing, frozen eyeballs reflected from the frightened faces of those also trapped in the tower.

  The guards are waiting, not for her specifically, but for anyone. She, as an individual, as an agent of the demise of this city, has been tactically forgotten. Her past, present and future have become the sum of several ill-advised decisions brought upon by her... what? What was it I was trying to achieve? She asks herself? Why did I do this? It wasn’t supposed to end like this. It isn’t my fault. Eventually, she almost convinces herself.

  When she reaches the bottom of the steps, she steps toward the door. Just as the battery on her cellphone, her only light in this utter blackness filled only with the sounds of terrified breathing, dies out, she touches the crash-bar of the door to the outside. She slowly depresses the handle and eases the door open with a soft squeak of hinges. The starlight nearly blinds her, yet it is only enough to show her the silhouette of the two guards outside. It seems odd that they are looking toward the building, watching for any movement. She has never imagined that this apartment building of luxury condominiums would become her prison. She has never considered the possibility that she, of all people, would not be allowed to leave of her own free will.

  She is thinking something along those lines as she opens the door wide enough to slip through.

  She is still in disbelief when the rough hands pull her back from the street as she steps out and throw her unceremoniously back into the dark stairwell.

  She is so surprised that she does not utter a single word, or cry for help.

  Her scattered breathing joins those trembling all along that dark, dark stairwell.

  No one sleeps.

  Chapter Ten – The Fight on the Tracks

  Jonah

  As I walk along the train tracks, I start counting steps. One hundred, five hundred, one thousand, two thousand... in the end I lose my count. The fog rolls in eventually and the only light I have to see the track in front of my feet is like a memory. The night is cold, and the mist of the fog, warm though it seems at first, soon chills me wet to the bone.

  Shivering, nearly shaking with cold and anxiety that has had no release, I hesitate for a few moments to rub my limbs and try to dry my hands on my pant-legs. Bending down on one knee, I can see the tracks clearly for several metres in either direction. The misty fog itself seems to glow with the reflection of the waning moonlight.

  I feel uneasy; I feel that I am being watched.

  Turning back in the direction I have come, I see a pair of legs standing not far from me, motionless, in the gloom.

  “Who’s there?” I call out, wishing that my voice didn’t carry as far as it seems to, since there may be others nearby.

  “It’s only me,” says the man’s voice, which I don’t recognise, yet doesn’t seem unfamiliar. “I have been following you for quite some time now.”

  I remain crouched low, wondering if the owner of the voice is a friend, like the man in the church, or Michael or Gabe, or someone to fear, whom I cannot name.

  “Who are you?” I ask, my voice no louder than a whisper through my strangling fear.

  “I am a friend, Jonah,” he says. “I can help you. I can help you help yourself.” His voice is clear and bold, and somehow insistent at the same time
.

  “I don’t need your help.” I know what I need to do, I’m just too...

  “Scared?” he says, as if in response to my thoughts. “Scared that you might get hurt? That it’s all your fault? That you have to do something, even though you don’t know what it is?”

  The voice and its words are sympathetic, yet the tone is somehow derogatory, impatient, even as he says that he has been following me for a while, only to speak when spoken to.

  I wonder if he’s even there at all.

  “What would you have me do?” I say, trying not to burble the words out in a tumble.

  A pause – I can almost feel the smile arise on his lips – and I know that this is not someone whom I can trust.

  “You should go home, Jonah,” he answers, finally. “I can’t imagine how worried your family might be.”

  “I can imagine,” I say, flatly, “that my wife wouldn’t appreciate me bringing the likes of you home with me.”

  “I will only follow you if you follow me, Jonah. I can be your guide through this. You need my help. You’ve already asked for it, haven’t you?”

  “Don’t patronize me, man, I don’t want you following me, so just turn around and go your own way.”

  The sound of his angered breathing is audible through the mists. My tired legs are beginning to cramp up, so I stand.

  “I am not a man!” he says in a seething whisper. “I am not like you, nor am I like that feeble idiot Michael or the scolded child Gabriel, forever wishing he had left well alone.”

  I feel my head shoot up, shocked to hear the names, and the man behind the voice can feel it. His smile is evident as he continues.

  “Ah, you are surprised to hear that I know your little friends,” he says. “Does it surprise you that much, really, knowing how powerful I am, that you are not so much in control of this situation as you would like to believe?”

  I remain rooted in place, unable to move, feeling a slight breeze begin to blow the fog away from us.

  “Your fear is fear of me, Jonah,” he says, almost visible now. “Your anger is my anger. Your passion is my passion. Your weakness is thus because I will it to be so. You are powerless because I own your power. You are nothing.”

  I cannot speak. I cannot respond. The chill left behind from the cool mist is heightened by the wind as it gets stronger. The dim gloominess of the fog is replaced by the darkness of true night.

  The face across from me is clear now, standing only a few steps away. It is the most frightening sight I have ever seen in my life; my own face staring back at me, smiling evilly with hidden knowledge. A face more real even than my own because it appears to glow in the darkness with a black radiance that cannot be mistaken for anything but raw power and instils only fear in my heart, wiping all thought from my naked mind.

  “You fear me, Jonah,” he begins. “Yet, as you can see, I am you. More you than even you can be. Where you bow to pressure, I am resilient. Where you collapse, I endure. I will make it home tonight, and you will die of fear, with urine running down your legs while you try to remember how to fight for what is yours.”

  That stings. I know that he is merely taunting me, yet the mirror appears only in truth, no? Is not the reflection of darkness still darkness?

  Suppressing a shudder, I thrust my hands into my pockets, bowing my head as I do so, unable to maintain the stare of this being that has impersonated me.

  “Are you Satan?” I ask, wishing immediately that I had not done so.

  There is no answer, only the smile, with a slight tilting of his head in my direction, seeming to creep nearer to me with every breath; it appears as if this shade will engulf me with its glowing darkness, with nothing I can do about it.

  My hands become fists in my pockets, balled up in frustration at my inability to act; remembering finally the words that had so affected me earlier: Will you serve?

  Whom will I serve, I think to myself, deep within my mind.

  My left hand closes on a smooth stone, hidden within my pocket, and suddenly it is so obvious what I must do, so obvious the duty, so easily evident the responsibility I have been given. I am buoyed by the simple clarity of it. The rock is the jewel for a blade. Michael is forging me... or someone, maybe anyone, to do... something... what? Can I be the blade? Can I really serve this purpose? Who would serve? It is God? Or just people, maybe.

  I take the rock from my pocket; it seems to provide a strength to me, all on its own, even though it is just a small stone. I hold it up to the faint light of the moon to try and look at it closer, and as I do so I realize that I have forgotten the strange man-reflection. Looking around, somehow strangely calm now, I see that he is gone.

  And I stand, there, roughly twenty miles from the city, still not half-way home yet, wondering which way to go. Do I turn back, and try to help those people? Should I continue on, and hope to be home by morning, and do... what?

  What is my purpose?

  I look up at the sky, not for the first time this day, and yell out “I don’t know what to do!” I hold up the stone, too. “What does this mean?” My voice sounds out of place and isolated in the dead quiet of the night, disappearing into the darkness. There is no sound except the light lapping of waves on the lakeshore.

  I think back to when I was sitting on the train watching this same scenery pass by in a wink. Why did I get on the train this morning? Why did I leave my family, thinking there would be danger, like Gabe said? Did I expect something to become clearer to me? Did I imagine that things would become more obvious, or easier to deal with? The questions tear me in two directions at once, my indecision like a splinter that hurts less when left alone than pulled out, but eventually becomes infected and inflamed. I want to go home, but I feel myself pulled back.

  Back the way I have just walked.

  I turn westward toward the city and start to retrace my steps. Oddly enough, my thoughts twirl instantly away from my indecision and the indeterminate purpose that I seemed to be hovering around, to a much more practical, logistical concern: what do I do with a city full of displaced people?

  Striding with a quickened, yet steady pace, my mind begins to boil with possibilities. They come at me so fast that I don’t stop to think of the problems leading up to the point where a group of people become mobilized to the point where they are in a position to follow me. I don’t it see it that way, at this point, deep in the night, on the tracks. That battle is over.

  After a few minutes of walking, the moon comes out from behind the clouds, nearly directly overhead now, and the stars swell with brightness in the absence of ambient light from the city. The peacefulness of the night seems to override the anxiety in my heart from earlier.

  The voice in my head is silent, and I know that no one is following me – I don’t even turn around to check.

  …

  Rachel

  Rachel stands by the window. The children are sleeping across the room in the bed she normally shares with Jonah.

  He has not often been absent overnight, but it seems that none of the regular commuters have returned from work tonight. The street is nearly empty of cars, and most houses have a window at which a pair of glowing eyes keeps watch.

  Where are you, Jonah? Why couldn’t you have stayed home today?

  In the early hours of the morning, Rachel eventually lays down beside the children, but she does not sleep.

  Sometime later, when she feels so tired that she must close her eyes, a darkness deeper than closed eyes envelops the neighbourhood. The streetlamps, nightlights, reading lights, standby lights and all other electrical devices, click off with the abrupt loss of power. Hope seems to glimmer, though, all on its own, for a few moments in the darkness, just as Rachel drifts off to a dreamless sleep.

  Chapter Eleven – Awakening

  Herb

  My name is Herb Wiseman, and I wasn’t always like this.

  The city is darker than it has ever been, since before it was even here, I imagine. It certainly was so
mething to see it switched off last night; I just never imagined it would be like this. I can remember a time when I wondered what it would be like when it happened – when there wasn’t any fuel or electricity left or something like that. It never seemed like a real fear, back then, just some interesting dilemma that someone ought to be doing something about.

  Well, who’s worried about it now, I wonder? I wish it still meant something to me, in a way, but none of these things even seem to register on the scale anymore, after everything that’s happened. How can I be worried about riding on trains, or driving around in a car, or keeping the house warm, or even having enough money to get through the month, when none of those things are even remotely possible even if there was anything left? I haven’t been worried about those things in a long time.

  I think for bit about going up to the little hill in the park to see what the stars look like, but it’s probably too foggy, and everyone’s hiding out tonight anyways. We’re all tucked up into every nook and cranny in every sheltered place we can find to keep us out of the cold mist that seems to cling to us like a film of grime that won’t wear off. I wonder what those stars might have looked like before all of this. Not before the lights went out, or the pumps went dry, but before I found myself wandering the streets and back-alleys of this forsaken city looking for anything remotely edible, or something to drink, or someone more vulnerable than myself to take it from.

  Where was I before I jammed myself into the corner of an old warehouse between some empty crates and some fellow that stinks to high heaven like rotten whiskey and clinks when he shivers? Or is that me that clinks and stinks and shivers in the night? Am I cold, or am I hungry? I can’t remember what those things feel like anymore. I think I was a good guy, before all this, back when I knew how warm-and-fed felt different to cold-and-hungry. I think I was good, but how could I have ended up like this if I was?

  I thought I wouldn’t have cared, but earlier today when I found a paper bag full of half-eaten french-fries and part of a chicken sandwich, I nearly cried out in joy. Oh yes, that’s what hunger is, I think to myself, remembering how the salt felt against my tongue when I tasted that first little morsel. That’s what real hunger feels like – because you know you’ll never be full again – and you eat it really slow to try and forget again.